Microsoft to Open up Office Formats

Been on TV writes to tell us that Microsoft is expected to announce on Tuesday the opening of their Office file formats, according to Financial Times. From the article: "Microsoft will submit its Office file formats to Ecma International, the standards body, which will develop the documentation and make it available to the industry. The move is being supported by a number of organizations including Apple Computer, Barclays Capital, BP, Intel and Toshiba."

Comments

Hold on...

[jurv!s]

this could change everything!!

Re:Hold on...

[lightyear4]

It certainly could change everything - or at least get the ball rolling. These latest developments stem from pressure exerted upon Microsoft from the open source community (and all of the open standards that come along with it) and, more importantly, from its success. Ultimately, we'll see software and computing industry shift into a business model based on service alone. This way, competition is no longer a race to market the latest and greatest features -- it becomes a competition based upon who best serves the customer. (Think RedHat and its booming support-based business). Governments, businesses, and private citizens will all benefit from this approach.

Re:Hold on...

[Ravatar]

That's a pretty mislead statement.

Microsoft is opening their file formats because interoperability is king, open-source or closed.

Re:Hold on...

[joe user jr]

It's kind of misleading. The pressure on m$ is coming from the fact that many government departments are waking up to the fact that it's absolutely insane to "own" millions of vital files which are written in a format where they can't produce software to access the contents themselves in the way that they choose. In a quite real sense, they are only by-proxy "owners" of such data (the proxy being the m$ programs in question, of course).

However, they wouldn't be waking up to this were there not a healthy looking and viable alternative in the form of OpenOffice, which, as well as delivering true ownership of the files, also provides (most of) the convenience, bells and whistles of the m$ software stable. So in that sense, open source is a driver of this pressure.

That's why I think the half-assed, quasi-open strategies discussed in some posts here do not present a real long-term option for m$ - once people are fully awake to the fact they don't really own their own data, only real open formats will solve m$'s marketing problem, and we'll see a real shift in the file-format landscape, of which this latest thing may be an early sign.

Re: Hold on...

[Dolda2000]

That really depends. The questions is: Is it the current, binary MSO file formats that they will standardize and publish? If so, it might indeed change a lot of things. However, if it's just the new XML-based formats for the next version of Office that they will submit to the ECMA, it changes very little from the current situation, since they've already committed to making them open. I read TFA very briefly, and I couldn't find a mention of which file format it is referring to.

All in all, it's probably just a ploy to soften up Massachusetts, claiming that their formats is as "open" as OpenDoc, while probably requiring license fees, or make alternative implementations very hard in one or another way.

Re:Hold on...

[SeventyBang]

They're opening their file formats because they still has a trump card. Or has anyone forgotten about this?

A quick patch or two to Microsoft Office (now one of their biggest or the biggest ca$h cow - 1/3 of their profits?) and MS Office suddenly reads|writes XML format only. They aren't about castrating themselves voluntarily. They still have shareholders to keep happy, but more importantly, they want to be the trendsetters, no matter what.

How does this impact Open Office? Open Office can then read the XML Format because it's declared in the patent. But what O^2 won't be able to do is write the MS Office XML Format [except to violate the patent]. This means: no interoperability and any business which wants to migrate away from a closed system (MS Office) to Open Office can do so only as a one-way trip, burning the bridge behind them. And the company can't communicate both directions, so that forces a move en masse.

Re:Hold on...

[Al Dimond]

I'm not sure you understand what a "standard XML file" is; an XML file is just meaningless (but nicely organized) data if it doesn't have some kind of "schema" associated with it, telling what that data means. XML office formats use a schema that gives the data meaning in terms of word processing or spreadsheet documents. If you can't write files using that schema without violating a patent, and if you can't obtain a patent license for some reason, then you're pretty much stuck if you try to write out compatible files. There's no "standard" definition of XML for word processing or spreadsheet documents; there's OpenDocument and there are the MS Office formats.

Re:Hold on...

[Cocoshimmy]

Not sure if you are aware of this, but the idea of a patent is to show the details of your invention (which can be seen as opening up the standard in this case) and register it with the US patent office(or whichever patent office) to protect it. Now the fact that they are declaring it as a standard format is irrelevant, they do own the patent and can do whatever the law says they can with it. http://developers.slashdot.org/users.pl Create an Account Many patented standards have been documented for public use but are still protected by patents and thus require licensing. The CDMA cell phone network is a good example of this. All the low level signal specifications and circuitry requirements for digital communication between CDMA devices is well known and thoroughly documented. It's widely recognized as one of the larger cell phone network standards. However, you still cannot develop CDMA devices without first getting a license from Quallcomm which owns the patents. Just recently in fact, Quallcomm was suing Nokia for developing CDMA devices without the proper licensing. Similarily, Microsoft can open up the internal details of their office format (they have to do this to patent their format anyways) and still require developers license their format if they wish to use it.

Re:Hold on...

[cbreaker]

Too bad you guys put on AC mode..

One modded down post won't make your karma bad, in fact, if you only get good karma you have less of a chance to get mod points.

Licensing

[queenb**ch]

And how much of your soul will you have to sign away in order to use this?

2 cents,

Queen B

Re:Licensing

[Kjella]

And how much of your soul will you have to sign away in order to use this?

2 cents,

I hear 2 cents of a soul. Do I hear five cents? Three cents? It's not much to look at anyway, is it? Going once, going twice...

Re:Licensing

[Total_Wimp]

And:

-Will they allow changes in the standard after submission?
-Will they use those changed standards in their own products?
-Will they not release new formats until approved by the standards board?

One of the problems with OO.o, and a lot of other software that clones existing document formats, is that they're always late to the game. If Microsoft released Office 12 today with a new document format that no one has seen, even if it was immediately released to the standards body it would be months or years until an open source product could be released that would duplicate the format. As long as Microsoft leads, everyone else has no choice but to follow.

TW

Re:Licensing

[Swamii]

According to this post by a Microsoft employee, the format is free to use. In his next post, Brian points out that the license is perpetual; that is, it cannot be changed once granted. He cites the license itself, which says, that the license is perpetual for everyone, and is only terminable if the individual sues Microsoft over patent infringement claims relating to reading or writing of Office Schemas.

Re:Licensing

[Nutria]

And how much of your soul will you have to sign away in order to use this?

The question then to ask is what the ECMA policy is on licensing standards.

MSFT also submitted part of .NET to ECMA, and it didn't have any license fees attached to it, so that might be a good sign.

Re:Licensing

[Bazzalisk]

You think you still have a soul?

Ever accepted an EULA?

Re:Licensing

[Belseth]

And how much of your soul will you have to sign away in order to use this?

Just all the code your company has written, is writing, or ever will write. Not that much really.

Re:Licensing

[BasilBrush]

Out of date. That refers to Microsoft's pseudo open format licensing. Specifically crafted to exclude GPLed software from legally using the formats. If this announcement tomorrow is supposed to mean that Massachusetts and the EU won't drop them, then it will have to drop the license terms that stop sub-licensing, such that GPL apps may use the formats. Anything less won't cut it.

Re:Licensing

[Keeper]

It doesn't take much to "craft" a license agreement such that it is incompatible with the GPL. The GPL is pretty much incompatible with every license available.

Re:Licensing

[mormop]

"the license is perpetual for everyone"

But will support for it in MSOffice be perpetual? I mean support for existing office formats isn't guaranteed between one version and the next. The new format could be in MSOffice for long enough to capture the vast majority of Government and enterprise contracts before a free upgrade installs a new new format that imports the free one but only saves out to the new version.

OK, so level criticism for an over cynical approach but if a car dealer sells me 10 piles of crap in a row it'd take more than a promise to be nice this time to convince me that that they've changed.

Re:Licensing

[jc42]

[T]he format is free to use. In his next post, Brian points out that the license is perpetual; that is, it cannot be changed once granted.

We've seen other such licenses that have turned out to be very misleading. For example, if I use the license and write software that implements the specs, can I legally sell my software? The fact that I have a license doesn't mean that I can pass the license on to others in my products.

There are lots of potential legal gotchas in a lot of "free" licenses. Given MS's history, a bit of paranoia is in order here. We need people suggesting ways that they can turn around and sue us into bandruptcy if we use their specs. Then we need assurances that they won't sue us in any of those ways. And we need lawyers looking at the assurances and telling us whether they're legally meaningful, or whether we might get sued anyway.

After all, consider the RIAA. Who'd have ever thought that someone could be sued for buying a recording, sticking it into their own sound equipment and playing the music? But that's happening these days. We've even just had a story of recordings that intentionally damage our playing equipment when we attempt to play the music.

Paranoia here is quite appropriate.

Re:Licensing

[sydb]

There's a very big difference between:

• two software licenses being incompatible such that code under one license may not be relicensed by all and sundry under the other; and
• a license to a file format preventing the implementation of that file format in any piece of software under a specific license.

The first is common and acceptable. The latter is a deliberate attempt to look good while not being good.

Don't pretend you don't know that.

Re:Licensing

[Captain Perspicuous]

I think you nailed the central problem: Unless MS also outlines an open process how new features are implemented to these Office Formats, they will still be perceived as "closed" because the world of office users will keep looking towards Microsoft for "guidance to the future" instead of looking towards a standard comittee for future changes.

Re:Licensing

[Fishstick]

But it's my *soul*!!

Have you ever *seen* your soul? I mean, you don't actually *need* one, now do you? It's kind of like your appendix -- I mean, what's it actually *for* ?

Re:Licensing

[Keeper]

In order to 'legally' use a patent, you need a license to the patent. The GPL prohibits any requirement which forces said license to be included in any GPL software.

The GPL is incredibly restrictive about what you can suck in. Everything must be free, both in and out. Patents are not "free". Therefore they can't freely be sucked 'in'. And you can't distribute GPL'd software without the license to the patent, meaning it can't be freely pushed 'out'.

I don't see how anyone can view this is being a deliberate attempt to subvert the GPL. The philosophy behind the GPL by its very nature prohibits this sort of thing. I suppose there is a bit of irony about how one of the more restrictive OSS licenses produces something ultimately free-er than the less restrictive licenses.

Re:Licensing

[Art Tatum]

I'd rather argue against a hundred idiots than have one agree with me.

You've certainly come to the right place.

Re:Licensing

[masklinn]

a standard != the standard

Just so you know, C# is standardized by the ECMA. Does that make it the only programming language in the world? Uuuh nope.

Re:Licensing

[mrchaotica]

Who says? Where has the EU or any other litigant specified sublicensing as imperative?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Massachusetts did (although it's not a "litigant").

Re:Licensing

[BasilBrush]

Massachusetts quite explicitly did in their document on requirements for a new file format standard.
I don't think the EU have. But it was only a matter of time.

Re:Licensing

[Short Circuit]

I'd have to argue that having one company in control of the standard is actually better, in some ways, than a multi-company committee.

Within a well-organized company, an internal committee can be pressured to put aside politics and bickering, and get a product out the door. And different departments won't hold different patents. In a committee where multiple companies are represented, each company will be pushing to get their own patented techniques included in the final version, leading to a hodgepodge standard that's expensive to license.

There's the OSS side of it, too: If one company controls the committee, it also controls the patent. It can license those patents, as a group, for use under OSS projects. With multiple companies, it becomes more difficult to get everyone to release their patents under the same license.

They needn't bother

[Abuzar]

it's easier to hack them than read their docs.

Having an effect

[suso]

Call it what you want. But I imagine that open source definately has had a major effect on the industry over its lifetime. It has definately been worth all the effort. Despite what some may think.

Re:Having an effect

[Alien Being]

"open source definately has had a major effect on the industry over its lifetime"

MS has certainly taken notice. But let's face it, this move is just one more misdirection in their shell game. If they had any intention of playing fair, they would have started before now.

They'll use this to convince governments to stick with MSOffice and that everything will be fine because the formats will be open. But as soon as OpenOffice has the format covered, MSWord will start hiding the document's content inside some secret extension. They've been using dirty tricks for 30 years so I'd be more than a little surprised if they stopped tomorrow.

Open Source has helped to expose them as dishonest proprietors. Now it must expose them as Open Source imposters.

Re:Having an effect

[MattskEE]

I suspect the trend for governments, including our own MA, to move to open document formats had a great deal to do with this move. They would have lost a great deal of business if they had not made this move. Open Source is good in and of itself, and because people are starting to realize its potential, other businesses have to adapt to market pressures and imrove themselves. Open Source will have to find new ways to distinguish itself from MS. Competition only improves products.

Let me be the first to say...

[Anonymous Coward]

...It's a TRAP!

Hmm...

[lordmetroid]

I wonder what kind of impact Microsoft hopes to achive by doing this. I would guess they belive that when more software can use their format they will create the standard. But the thing is, they allready do this sort of.

I for one don't see how opening a file format so engaraved in society that it has become a standard for non-geeks can make an additiona revenue.

Define "open up"

[Psionicist]

So.. Will they really open everything, or just wrap their proprietary implementation inside XML and therefore claim their format is "open"?

I hope they really open up the format. Otherwise it'd be as bad as RIAA promoting DRM "for freedom". Sigh.

Re:Define "open up"

[Chordonblue]

We'll have to see, but clearly MS is doing everything they can to avoid having to use the Open Document format. How they will continue to keep .DOC proprietary to some degree is a mystery to me...

Re:Define "open up"

[vsprintf]

I hope they really open up the format.

The format? Which one? Word 97, Word 2000, and Word 2003 document formats all have incompatibilities going both forward and backward. Apparently, every version has its own format. What about the next version of Word?

18 months?

[dada21]

It seems odd that it will take 18 months to develop documentation for the file formats. Sure, the formats must be complex, but it seems like maybe this documentation organization might not be a truly independent standards body.

Ecma's wiki and site seems to be pretty much confirm that they're composed of manufacturer members. I wouldn't consider them the equivalent of ANSI or UL. 18 months of work by a collusive industry is more throwing those governments a bone than actually getting the work done right.

I guess there should be some applause for getting the ball rolling. Uphill?

Re:18 months?

[sribe]

It seems odd that it will take 18 months to develop documentation for the file formats. Sure, the formats must be complex, but it seems like maybe this documentation organization might not be a truly independent standards body.

It's worse than that. Like RTF, they will change the formats arbitrarily with every revision of office, and will then probably take 18 months to document each new version. And of course they will claim this is complete openness and interoperability, ignoring that they're keeping 3rd parties 18 months behind...

Re:18 months?

[Bogtha]

It seems odd that it will take 18 months to develop documentation for the file formats.

It's not 18 months to develop documentation, it's 18 months to develop the standard. That's relatively quick. Bear in mind that whatever internal documentation Microsoft has may be relatively sparse, and will probably make a lot of assumptions about how things are handled that might not hold true for other implementations. It ends up being a lot of work to find all the little corner cases and assumptions which are only really codified in the source itself, and distill that into a readable description of what implementations should do.

Sure, the formats must be complex, but it seems like maybe this documentation organization might not be a truly independent standards body.

I don't follow your logic. The process is slow, therefore ECMA is in Microsoft's back pocket? Why would the slowness of standardisation be evidence of ECMA bias?

ECMA is the organisation that standardised Javascript. And before all the snarky comments begin, it's worth pointing out that ECMA-262 (Javascript) implementations are remarkably consistent and interoperable; it's only the host objects that are inconsistent between browsers, and that's outside ECMA-262's scope (for that, you want to direct your attention towards the W3C DOM specifications).

Re:18 months?

[jc42]

Ecma's wiki and site seems to be pretty much confirm that they're composed of manufacturer members. I wouldn't consider them the equivalent of ANSI or UL.

A related point that I'm wondering about: When the standards specs are complete, how will I get them? Will they be online? Or will I have to pay and sign an NDA to get a copy?

This isn't an idle distinction. I well remember, back in the 1980's, working on networking projects where we really wanted to get the OSI stuff up and running alongside IP, to compare them. A problem was that the OSI specs weren't online; they could only be ordered in print. By the time we got a purchase order approved, an order sent, and the docs delivered, we had long since downloaded the RFCs for the internet equivalent and implemented it all. And part of the problem was that we had to hand-type the stuff from the OSI specs, leading to lots of typos and extra time to spot the typing errors. The IP docs could be directly copied to the code without error. (And yes, I am one of those weirdos who writes perl scripts that read spec docs and spit out code. I've gotten all sorts of funny reactions from people when they first discover those entries in my makefiles. ;-)

The end result was that our OSI code could never catch up with the IP code. It couldn't even come close, simply due to the delays in dealing with for-pay, on-paper specs when the competitor was instantly available online in machine-readable form.

If we'd had to sign NDAs for the OSI stuff, we'd never have gotten anywhere. But then, I guess we really didn't anyway, because all that OSI code is now dead and forgotten.

I can see ECMA using a similar approach to delay us "open source" geeks, so they can hold it semi-private while oh-so-innocently pretending to have opened it all. It'll likely be open in the same sense as the OSI specs, but maybe with NDAs. With MS's marketing clout, the effect won't be to eliminate those formats from the market. The main effect will be a big drag on developers' time, as they try to jump through all the hoops required to get something working.

I do expect that 6 months from now, we'll be hearing a lot of "Hey, we opened the formats, but nobody else has implemented them. Our competitors must be intentionally ignoring them; or maybe they're just incompetent." No mention of the fact that the specs haven't been published yet. And, if computing history is any guide, that 18-month estimate means at least 3 years, probably more.

This sort of thing isn't what you'd call a efficient. But I don't suppose anybody ever called software a rational market.

What about patents ?

[sunya]

It may be an ECMA standard, but it could still be patented. IIRC, the ECMA / patent issue affect Mono as well. From the Mono FAQ : "The core of the .NET Framework, and what has been patented by Microsoft falls under the ECMA/ISO submission"

Having a standard != Strictly following a standard

[HateBreeder]

See Internet Explorer/HTML...

Ogg Vorbis, Png, and Odt benefit everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Ogg Vorbis, Png, and Odt benefit everyone, even the people who have never used any of these three formats. Ogg Vorbis benefits everyone because it stops Thomson from taking any legal action against the free Lame mp3 encoder and XMMS mp3 playback library; Thomson knows that if they have their lawyers even look at the Lame web page, the entire Open Source community will perform a mass exodus to the Ogg format.

The PNG format, in addition to being far superior to GIF, kept Unisys from taking too much legal action against GIF; the little legal action they took increased cross-browser PNG compatibility to the point that people can safely put non-transparent PNG images on their web pages today.

Odt will benefit everyone because this format gives Microsoft a clear message to open up their .doc file format.

Re:Ogg Vorbis, Png, and Odt benefit everyone

[808140]

Not only that, but all browsers (including all PNG-supporting versions of IE) support 8-bit PNG with transparency -- these are functionally equivalent to GIF, that is, you're limited to 256 colors and can choose one of those colors to mean "transparent" if you need it (of course there's no alpha blending, it's either fully transparent or not transparent at all).

What this means in practice is that there is no reason whatsoever to use GIF. PNGs are smaller in virtually all cases, they are free and patent unencumbered, and are a W3C standard. The whole notion that PNGs are broken is limited to features that PNG supports that GIF does not support, like alpha blending. Furthermore, if you can forgo alpha, you can use all sorts of features with PNG that GIF does not support (the most obvious being more than 256 colors).

The reason I think so few people realize this is because for some reason, creating 8-bit PNGs in most software suites seems to be a pain in the ass. I haven't done web dev for a while now, but I remember creating PNGs in the GIMP, drawing them out using only full opacity/full transparency, and still getting an 8-bit alpha channel (which of course produces the ugly gray blotches in IE a previous poster was talking about) when saving them with the GIMP. The answer of course was to tweak them with pngcrush from the command line.

More pain than it's worth, certainly, but as soon as you get 8-bit PNGs with only a 1-bit alpha channel, they display just fine in all browsers except the text-based ones.

Don't use GIF. The patent issue is moot now, but the compression used in PNGs is much better than GIFs and if your site gets accessed at all frequently you will save money on bandwidth using PNG.

This is good.

[Descalzo]

Finally Microsoft will have to sell products based on the quality of the software instead of the customer being railroaded into keeping the ability to read their files in the future.

I think Office is a fine product, but I always felt a little cheated that I couldn't read newer files on my older version.

Halt OpenDocument

[Anonymous Coward]

I would suspect that this move is in order to a) Halt Opendocument before it spreads too wide, thus bringing publicity to Microsofts stance, and b) secure a future for their Office product.

Is the devil in the details?

[Luminary Crush]

This seems like a great win for users everywhere in general and OSS in specific. The article is light on details - who exactly will have access to these open specs? How will licensing be applied? Is it patented - apparently you can patent everything these days.

I'll wait to see ALOT more details before becoming giddy with excitement...

opendocument?

[bsdluvr]

Am I the only one who fears they will never implement OpenDocument support, but rather 'open' their proprietary formats?

Against government use of OASIS format

[tepples]

I wonder what kind of impact Microsoft hopes to achive by doing this.

Fully documenting the Microsoft Office file formats and permissively licensing any essential patents could help dissuade governments from migrating to OASIS OpenDocument format, which happens to be the native format of a competing software package called OpenOffice.org 2.x.

Which license

[afidel]

Will this be a RAND deal where you can get the specs under a restrictive license after paying a "reasonable" fee, or will it be a true, open standard. From the ECMA website it says

To publish these Standards and Technical Reports in electronic and printed form; the publications can be freely copied by all interested parties without restrictions.

But I'm not sure that all the standards they adopt have to be so free. For instance MS can open up the spec, but outside of europe they might still be able to restrict access to Open Source projects based on software patents they hold. I really hope this means free, but somehow I'm not holding my breath.

P.S. There's also the issue that even Microsoft might not fully understand the Office file formats. I know that this is true with SMB, the Samba team members know more about the wire protocol then anyone currently working at MS.

And..

[Eric Damron]

Are they also going to drop the patent encumbrances and change the license so it can be used by open source including GPL'd works?

I'm working on a word processor...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

But just what are they opening? The new XML formats? Or the binary sludge formats?

End of times...

[grasshoppa]

Apple choosing Intel, Dell choosing AMD, MS openning up Office formats.

Dogs and cats, living together! MASS HYSTERIA!

Re:catch?

[Nutria]

As far as I know, MS hasn't been in trouble over their office suite w/the ftc, why would they do this?

RTFA. They don't want to lose gov't business.

My take

[dslauson]

My take on this is that they have caught a lot of flak for not supporting open document. This way, they don't have to make any changes, and they don't have to support open document, but they'll still be supporting a document format that is open.

Now, many of the reasons for switching to open document will be nullified, and if Microsoft's doc becomes the standard, the burden will be on the OSS community to make changes to their software rather than the other way around.

Basically, it's MS's way of waying, "You want openness? Fine, but if we're going to play, we're going to play with our ball."

I think it would be awesome to see MS support an open standard. This seems like kind of a petty way to go about it, but that's the Microsoft we all love to hate, right?

Re:Wow.

[qodfathr]

I tried the free mail hosting with one of my rarely used domains. In the end, you end up with a Hotmail front-end -- you literally log into Hotmail (well, Passport actually), but rather than having a login id of 'john.smith@hotmail.com' you have 'john.smith@mydomainname.com' (you can use whatever user id format you like). Otherwise, it looks and feels like Hotmail -- including text advertisements at the bottom of any email you send. I assume the Outlook integration that Hotmail offers also works, but I did not try this. Mail boxes are limited to 250MB, and you can have 20 of them (IIRC).

If nothing else, it was extremely to set up, assuming you can easily change your domain's MX record.

Write not read

[dereference]

You're right. But look, I think it's even worse than you suggest. Look at this gem FTFA:

Within about 18 months, customers, competitors and developers should be able to download detailed files from Ecma on how to create a Microsoft Word, Powerpoint or Excel document.

This is going expose only a way to write to these formats. It says absolutely nothing about how to read documents created by their proprietary packages. It's much easier to say "here's how to create a valid document" without giving away all of the keys to the kingdom than it is to explain fully "here's how to read any document created by our suite" (and you have to presume they'll intentionally leave out the good stuff).

As far as I can tell, this is a no-op.

Re:Write not read

[dereference]

Do not a single one of you idiots understand a binary file format?

Well, on the admittedly limited chance that you're not trolling, and that instead you'll actually consider a reasoned response with an open mind, I'll try one more time. First, yes, we "idiots" do know exactly what we're talking about, so I honestly hope you'll bother to read and possibly even learn something.

The fine example you gave is a trivially simple and quite static format, similar to an image. It is far from complex and dynamic enough to describe any useful arbitrary document. If you'd actually re-read the post to which you replied, you'd find a much more relevant example, that of HTML. HTML can't be described as a basic C-style structure like your example, but a formal grammar such as BNF (or a DTD for XHTML) could be used. However, you can very easily omit many optional flags/features when describing how to write a valid document in any such format. As noted, I might only tell you only about the head, title, and body tags, and perhaps the h1-h7 tags as well.

Is it possible for me to neglect to tell you about all the other formatting tags (like b and i and friends) and even "forget" to mention the whole hyperlink concept with the "a" tag? Sure it is. Can you write a valid document? Sure you can. Now, can you really read all possible documents, including those that use the tags I so conveniently neglected to describe? No.

Let's even use your own example, with a modification:

long version 0x0100
long number of strings 0x0002
long string length
string
long string length
string
long number of options 0x0001
int option_num
int option_length
byte [] option_data
EOF

Here you see that I've told you how and where to add multiple options. However, I've not told you what options are valid. I might only tell you about some of the options and not others. You can always still write a document given that format, but you can't read all documents unless you've been told all the possible valid options.

So, really I hope this hasn't been a waste of time, and that you can see that Microsoft can choose to give out any arbitrary amount of detail for how to write a proper and valid document, without giving sufficient tools with which to parse all possible valid documents.

Re:Write not read

[shmlco]

Sorry. And while I understand the point you're making, I think all of you are focusing on a single word in a single sentence (i.e. create) and, quite illogically, extrapolating from there to the worst possible case. In fact, from the same article...

"The move will ensure that computer users will be able to open and work with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents without having to buy the Microsoft Office software to do so."

Which would imply the ability to both read and write documents. 'Nuff said.

Re:Write not read

[spitzak]

Several idiots here have replied that writing is harder than reading.

Why don't you try a *REAL* file format.

TIFF is a good example.

A program that writes a TIFF file can be about 100 lines (writes an arbitrary sized image in full 24 bit rgb or in 32 bit rgba).

To read a TIFF file you need a library of tens of thousands of lines (libtiff).

Why? Because in the TIFF header there is a "compression type" and a lot of other variables. If you are writing a TIFF file you only need to worry about one setting of these variables. To read them you need to worry about ALL of them.

Learn a little.

I fully agree that if they really say "write a Word document" they may very well be trying to make in one-directional.

finally

[know1]

somebody strongarms microsoft into doing something they don't want to do. if it weren't for a certain government office saying they would switch to open office because of the open file format issue, this would never have happened. now if only we can get the officials to say they will only view porn in mpg or avi or whatever and get microsoft to open up its video codecs for all

Re:catch?

[TubeSteak]

They'd do this because Open Office may be legitimately scaring them.

I'd like to say Massachusetts going OSS scared them more than they wanted to admit in public, but I think MA was merely the last straw. Various countries have been pushing OSS over the last few years.

There's another article on the front page of /. about Paris accellerating their plans to test Open Source .

Someone high up finally decided that file interoperability is critical if they don't want to lose their client base. Not only will this move placate antitrust authorities, but it'll allow corporate IT guys justify the vendor lock-in they have to accept in order to get deep discounts on corporate licenses.

Don't forget that Support is a big deal for companies. They like to have support contracts to fall back on.

Will change nothing

[AHumbleOpinion]

... Ultimately, we'll see software and computing industry shift into a business model based on service alone. This way, competition is no longer a race to market the latest and greatest features -- it becomes a competition based upon who best serves the customer ...

Thank you for restating the theory and hope behind OSS, now for reality ...

MS had previously published Word and Excel formats. They did so as they took over the market, as they destroyed the competition. The competitions support for Word and Excel formats further reinforced those proprams as the defacto standards.

Re:Will change nothing

[morganew]

There's also a larger problem with this approach - it sucks for small companies trying to become bigger.

If you are only able to profit off of service contracts, you can't 'write once, reach many' like you can with COTS software. Moreover, companies like IBM and Novell which have large established sales and service teams will win all the larger contracts.

If you write a great peice of software, and then have to sell, educate the customer AND hire/train all the workforce, how much time are you going to have to devote to Rev. 2 of your world beating product?

Whenever folks talk about OSS in the context of markets, I think it should be with a jaundiced eye towards our "helpmates" at IBM, Novell, SAP/MySQL and Sun.

Ultimately, IBM et al are about making money for shareholders, if they didn't see that as the likley outcome, they would not be out there pimping OSS.

I think a world where software is only 'sold' in the context of a service contract is bad for the next great idea. OSS is great in its place, but to preclude software for sale isn't the answer.

Re:Will change nothing

[The Bubble]

If you write a great peice of software, and then have to sell, educate the customer AND hire/train all the workforce, how much time are you going to have to devote to Rev. 2 of your world beating product?

That's just it, though. the OSS movement recognizes the ability of an individual to have brilliant, novel ideas, but complements that with the admission that bugs, errors, and incremental improvements are better made in aggregate, with the "many eyes, many hands" philosophy.

If you have a great idea for a piece of software, write it, and put it out there. With the help of millions of other programmers, what might have been yet another piece of download.com freeware might become the next Apache, or the next Python.

Re:Will change nothing

[morganew]

On top of that, there aren't Millions of eyes on any project, and most OSS projects have about a dozen key programmers who do 99.999999% of all the work.

I know that's how it works on everything I've been involved with.

Sure, the LAMP stuff may have more reviewers, but how 'bout bug FIX submitters??

I look over the lists and I see lots of complainers and very few new coders.

Re:Will change nothing

[morganew]

Right, and this is at the heart of my point: It SUCKS to be a computer programmer in this new world. Especially one where IP is devalued. Even if I had an idea that I wanted to sell, your business' ability to hire cheap programmers in India or China and duplicate my work pretty much destroys my incentive to run up my credit card bills on the hopes of selling my software to make a living.

So customers "win" in the short term, but we may harm truly radical innovation. I frankly don't care that "customers win" if it means "I lose".

I don't think I understand "The-Trav-Man's" point up above. It's pretty hard to make more than an hourly living fixing issues for complaining customers. That's consulting work, and it can put a roof over your head, but it doesn't put a Lamborgini in your garage. You end up having to hire other cheaper programmers but charging your (higher) rates. -- you become a manager. You aren't spurring innovation, you're reading resumes.

one of the parent posters had it right, we may be seeing the end of COTS software as we knew it.

Re:Will change nothing

[flyingsquid]

In related news, the cyborg collective known as the Borg announced that they will open up the proprietary format used to convert biological entities to subcomponents of their organomechanical hive mind. This format specifies the synaptic-microprocessor relay standard used to effectively combine biological and cybernetic functions into a single, integrated carbon/silicon organo-electronic entity.

The move is viewed as an attempt by the Borg to stave off anti-trust litigation recently launched against the Borg by the Federation and the bloodthirsty lawyers of the Klingon Empire.

Re:Will change nothing

[einhverfr]

Right, and this is at the heart of my point: It SUCKS to be a computer programmer in this new world. Especially one where IP is devalued.

I am not sure about that.

Yes, one can take it to India, China, or wherever, but there is always value of hiring locally :-)

Secondly, the COTS vendors can take it to India, China, or wherever too so this is not unique to the FOSS world. So offshoring is a non-issue and is no different with COTS or FOSS.

So what is the difference? Money in your pocket. Like if you worked for Microsoft.

If you work for Microsoft today, you show up to work, get paid a salary, and go home.

If you want to start your own company with no VC, you show up for work, go home, and repeat until you have a product (living off of savings I presume). Then you try to sell it and recoup the expense of your labor.

With FOSS, you show up to work, bill your client, and go home. You get money in your pocket just as if you worked for Microsoft.

Re:Will change nothing

[killerkalamari]

In case anyone else is wondering what COTS means:

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/COTS.html

Re:Will change nothing

[ajs318]

Then don't be a computer programmer in this new world! Nobody said you had to be one. Or do be a computer programmer, but understand that you are not necessarily going to get paid just for programming. You do not have an automatic right to get paid for whatever you do. The sewage company do not pay me money everytime I take a dump in my toilet ..... I sometimes wish they would, but the simple fact is they don't need my shit that badly.

If Source Hoarding became illegal -- which I honestly hope it will in my lifetime -- you could always try eking out a living by charging people for independent source code audits.

First Question

[RAMMS EIN]

My first question, and likely that of many others, was: "Why are they doing this?"

Well, according to TFA, it's because of the European Commission has been urging companies to open up their document formats, and Microsoft feared the EC would stop using Microsoft's formats for the creation of public documents, and urge national governments to do the same.

So, thumbs up for the EU on this one!

wow

[wastedbrains]

wow microsoft must be far more scared of the recent successes and news for open office and the open document format. I thought they weren't paying enough attention to those projects. I have been 100% MS office free on my home systems for 3 years using open office and getting on open office 2.0 just made that much nicer (i still had many complaints about the old open office). Yeah M$ office still has it beat on many levels, but I would say 90% with newer machines that can handle the large overhead of Open Office would be completely satisfied and hardle ever run into a feature which they miss. (yes i know the officail name is OpenOffice.org, but that is long and i personally think the .org being in part of the name is LAME.)

Indeed

[sterno]

It will be interesting to see how "open" it really will be. The funny thing is I swear I've heard this before. Wasn't the big deal supposed to be how they were going to use XML and how this was going to allow them to place nicely with others?

I get the sense that Microsoft may take a security through obscurity approach with this. Make it a pain in the butt for somebody else to implement. Then keep adding new stuff to it so that there's always subtle incompatibilities with older software. A "open" format is of minimal value if third parties have to struggle to keep up with the standard.

License-free

[Ececheira]

According to one Microsoft guy, Microsoft is removing the royalty-free license requirment and instead is issuing an irrevocable commitment not to suethat says they won't ever sue you.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/11/ 21/495466.aspx

Models...

[shmlco]

"Ultimately, we'll see software and computing industry shift into a business model based on service alone."

Interesting prognostication, but I totally fail to see how this "shift" follows from the opening of the document formats. Not all software is best done by a bunch of hackers working in their spare time, as just a casual look around SourceForge will demonstrate. With such a huge number of failed and abandoned projects, and only a relatively few high-profile success stories (LAMP), I don't believe the FOSS model is a poster child for the end-all and be-all of success.

IMHO, there's still plenty of room for dedicated teams of developers putting their jobs on the line to create great, commercial-grade software for (you can shudder now) profit.

And as far as models go, I can see an equally likely future based not solely on service and support, but subscriptions...

Re:Models...

[Errandboy of Doom]

Clearly, the future will be based on whuffie.

Re:Models...

[Nate B.]

I can appreciate the count of "failed" and abandoned projects on SourceForge. By and large, they can be resurrected by anyone willing to do so. The open source world is not unique in this respect as there are probably thousands of shareware and freeware (not to mention commercial) programs that have been adandoned just since Win32 hit the street, not to mention since DOS hit the street. The critical difference is that in the majority of cases when a shareware or small commercial developer closes shop, the users are left with little recourse for further support.

At least F/OS Software is never truly dead. It may enter a state of dormancy or being a zombie, but it can always be brought back to life by anyone interested in doing so.

Pull the other one!

[jmorris42]

Lets put this PR spin through the reality filter.

1. Microsoft promising something 18 months down the road is meaningless. Hell, ANY tech company promising something 18 montsh out is meaningless.

2. This announcement is for Europe, without software patents.... for now. Of course if in 18 months there just HAPPEN to be software patents and said patents are licensed under their no-GNU terms... oh well, who wants to support smelly hippies anyway.

3. The only promised the ability to write, kida curious since most of the EU objections are about random folk being able to READ their government's output.

4. There is no committment to continue using this 'standardized' format in any future product. So there is nothing to provent them from releasing a future Office that uses an 'embraced and extended' version and either not documenting the changes at all or another 18 months after it ships.

MS is opening up the Office 12 XML format.

[massysett]

MS says it will go to ECMA first with the Office 12 XML format. They say that once Office 12 XML is recognized by ECMA, they will go to ISO. See News.com story.

BP?

[jshaped]

"The move is being supported by a number of organizations including Apple Computer, Barclays Capital, BP, Intel and Toshiba."

Since when is BP included with the likes of Apple and Intel?
Seems strange that BP's opinion matters in this subject.

Seems To Only Count For Writing

[EXTomar]

They are fully and openly specifying how to write all of the Office formats. While this is good, it does nothing for the other important half which is reading. They clearly don't want all applications to perfectly files generated by some software. This tatic seems to guarentees that at least one product will "clean" as well as special Office formats: Office itself.

I suppose people can take the information on how to write a valid "clean" Office format to make better format translators but we are still hosed for various random files that will be generated and only readible in sanctioned applications.

Re:Seems To Only Count For Writing

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading is the easy bit.
It's far simpler to reverse engineer a file format to get the information you want out of it - and leave the stuff that's irrelevant.

But trying to create a fragile binary file format full of stuff that's irrelevant to you, but required by other programs is very, very difficult. One bit wrong could create a document that causes other applications trying to read it to crash.

Re:Seems To Only Count For Writing

[jmv]

One bit wrong could create a document that causes other applications trying to read it to crash.

Am I the only one thinking that if your app crashes because one bit in a file is wrong, then not only is the app badly written, but the bug is also probably exploitable to run arbitrary code (buffer overflow and all)? Of course, I get the original idea that if a small detail is wrong, the file may be considered invalid.

Re:Seems To Only Count For Writing

[mikefe]

It has crossed my mind a couple times recently why we haven't seen buffer overflow attacks against word an excel.

Many people know it crashes with large files, it can also probably be exploited as well.

Even a two pronged attack of a word file with pretty girls and a small image with a buffer overflow attack. That in addition to another attack in the word formatting itself. Many will forward it because of the girls and have no idea that they are spreading a virus.

Or even better, a web site that exploits IE, Word & Excel!

OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird or be own3d!

It won't matter.

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

In 18 months, Vista will have shipped, most corporate desktops will be running it, and Office documents will be unreadable without the keys from the Microsoft Rights Management Server having been provided to the Fritz chip. The formats will be open, and it'll be a DMCA violation to read them.

Seems a bit fishy..

[Mike Savior]

Is it just me, or does this sound like an underhanded attempt to try and make sure Massachusetts doesn't happen all over again? They might open the format, but that still doesn't mean people won't fork over the large sum of money for Office.

strategies

[recharged95]

So, ok, they release the formats. This kills Oo's current sales pitch on properitary formats in motivating people to move to Oo. Time to thing of the counter-point (i.e. simplier, more elgant UI?).

That's pretty good salvo, but I wonder how DRM will play into this?

Heck, they are defining how DRM will be used in the software industry (not media in all cases).

Really read it... and then weep

[sjvn]

From the license:

"Microsoft may have patents and/or patent applications that are necessary for you to license in order to make, sell, or distribute software programs that read or write files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas."

and that's why this has never been acceptable to the open-source community.

Steven

here. see? it's open!

[szo]

Don't mind that little patent attached. Just look somewhere else. See, no bother!

Perhaps, but I suspect more of the same...

[msauve]

from Microsoft, albeit in a slightly different order.

Microsoft has historically "embraced" open industry standards by adding proprietary extensions, making its user's data worthless outside of the MS world.

In this case, I suspect they'll end up releasing, but still maintaining control over the office formats. If not there already, they'll make sure there's the ability to store proprietary objects (or meta-data, or whatever the current popular nomenclature is) in the now "open" format. They'll then simply move on to placing more and more document content in these proprietary closed objects, while claiming they're using an "open format."

Re:Perhaps, but I suspect more of the same...

[masklinn]

In this case, I suspect they'll end up releasing, but still maintaining control over the office formats.

Adobe has been doing it for years with the PDF format, and most people are ok with it.

Keeping control over the evolution of the format but having the specs fully open so as to allow completely compatible products is a good thing, I myself would appreciate it if MS did that.

Re:Perhaps, but I suspect more of the same...

[mrchaotica]

I would too, except that they're doing it only to kill a format that's even more free.

Re:Perhaps, but I suspect more of the same...

[ozmanjusri]

Adobe has been doing it for years with the PDF format, and most people are ok with it.

We're not OK with it. We've just never had a choice. Now that choice is looking possible, the companies that've been screwing us over all these years are scrambling to head it off at the pass.

If we're lucky, the open formats will have enough momentum to get us out of the trap and into the opportunities truly open documents will create, otherwise it'll be another decade or so of stagnation.

Minor nitpick

[TheConfusedOne]

Massachusetts did not go OSS. Massachussetts went open format (this also explains why PDF is an acceptable format too). The advantage is that vendors can compete with both closed and open solutions as long as the data they produce is in the open format.

If it's Microsoft...

[plazman30]

You can bet that Microsoft has a strong business plan for this back in Redmond to show this helps crush OpenOffice somehow. It would not surprise me if Microsoft filed for a slew of patents in the next 18 months. Or perhaps they're going to open up the Office 12 file format, but the earlier binary file format that probably 95% of customers are using will remain lock away to be reverse engineered.

That way when a government body wants to start using a "open" file format, Microsoft will happily sell them some software assurance program that gives them Office 12 at a good price, but locks them in for another 5 years or so.

Trust me, there is a good business plan back in Redmond on the table showing how this is going to work best for Microsoft in the long run.

The sad part is that, Microsoft owns the desktop for now. They could open source Office and Windows and they would STILL own the desktop.

How to kill an open standard...

[bwalzer]

Let's say you are a dominant player in a particular industry. Let's also say that your continued dominance depends on control of some sort of proprietary interface. Things are not so bad if competitors try to reverse engineer your interface. You just change things enough from time to time to keep them at a disadvantage. That's all fine and proper but sometimes your customers will be bad. They might conspire with your competitors to lessen your control of your market by proposing some soft of open standard that you have no direct control over.

Fortunately there is a fix available. What you do is start another open standard. Use your influence in the industry to promote this standard for all you are worth. Claim that you have seen the error of your ways. Get a bunch of pet suppliers and/or dominant players in related industries together and form a "Industry Association". Go to conferences. Give speeches. Actually support this new standard with your new products. Complete interoperability is just around the corner and you don't even have to switch suppliers if you don't want.

Inevitably the momentum will swing towards your open standard. Timing is critical here. You have to anticipate. Just as it seems clear to everyone which way to go suddenly back off on your support of your open standard. If it seems like you were a bit late simply start supporting and promoting the other open standard. The key here is balance. Keep both standards relevant for as long as it takes.

The effects on your customers will be grave. They will end up having to support 3 or more standards because they will still have a lot of the old stuff you made. Your customers deserve all this of course. They were disloyal. Eventually everyone will yearn for the old days of single source contracts. The open standards effort will eventually die on its own and the industry will have learned that open standards just don't work. There are just too many of them.

Repeat as needed and remember that this isn't just for things like the computer industry. It works for more traditional businesses as well. Microsoft didn't invent this stuff. They are just good at applying it

openly awful

[maffew]

An openly documented office file format is a step in the right direction.

But I think the bigger problem with MS Office is that the file format itself is horrid. From what I can gather, it's a cross between a raw object dump and a virtual memory cache.

This would explain why even MS Office can't reliably read its own documents, and why reverse engineering has been so slow and difficult.

In Microsoft Word 2.0, if you were editing a file on a floppy disk, and you swapped the floppy for another one (e.g. to copy text out of another file) without closing Word, then Word crashed and your doc file was trashed. I reckon the reason the file was trashed is that Word was using it as a swap file.

The same bug exists in Word 2002, released 10 years later. It happened to me when a network drive disconnected.

The fact that so many people rely on such a fragile file format is holding a lot of things back. How can anyone build on shifting sand? The sooner its replaced with something decent the better.

Imagine if digital cameras all used a closed image file format. A lossy format like JPEG, except that instead of discarding details humans don't notice, the format loses information that humans really care about. And instead of compressing data, it expands it.

I think a lot fewer people would enjoy using digital cameras if they worked that way.

Of course the file format is only the tip of the iceberg. There are substantial features in Word that are so broken that users quickly learn it's not worth using them. Other features are so unpredictable that they effectively discourage editing and experimentation. Expert users subconciously avoid features that cause problems.

I reckon the overall productive uptime with Word is about 90% - 95%, depending on the job at hand and the user. That's not too bad until you multiply 5% downtime by several hundred million daily users.

The quandry is that people won't be motivated to switch until something comes along that is both compatible and yet significantly improved. It's hard to be compatible with a dodgy file format, and projects like OpenOffice.org seem to be more of the same but open. It reminds me of the ponderous Mozilla browser. Mozilla and OOo are excellent projects, but what's needed is something like Firefox that strips off the barnacles, is open source so people can build on it, works roughly the way that people are used to, and yet simpler, faster and more reliable.

There are 5 billion literate people in the world. Isn't it time we had a writing tool that doesn't suck?

On The Contrary...

[EXTomar]

If you believe reading is the easy bit then look at Html. As "specified" as W3 has made Html no two browsers render many pieces of data the same way.

As I said before, it is interesting they are specifying how to write out proper Office Xml but it is somewhat meaningless for everyone but Office to understand how to read it properly. We can understand the heck out of how to write files and still end up with a lot of tinkering on how to read it in where two implementations interpt the format differently.

Hanlon's Razor (was: Having an effect)

[borg]

I am really uncomfortable in being put in a position of appearing to defend Microsoft. However, it occurs to me that some of the "secret extension" hackery you reference is, at least in part, a reflection of how hard it is to write open-ended, extensible file formats that work in a multitude of circumstances. On the flip side: when you're coding against a deadline set by marketing (we _need_ office 2007 _before_ 2008, guys!) a few corners gotta be cut. Hard to embed multimedia in a spreadsheet? Just hack together an ActiveX control to do it for you and stuff it in the file format. Oh, only works on Windows? Well that works for 95% of the population. Need to save a complex data relationship to disc? Why bother serializing? Just blop the object out of memory to disc wrapped in a tag. Don't you think defining and _adhering_ to a complex file format is one or two orders of magnitude harder that just getting something something put together that kinda works for us and the guys in the Poser Point group? Don't you think that the Office code base is a bit of a mess at this point in time?

Two non-Office examples:

1) It seems like its easier for someone to pull together some hackery-quackery using frontpage/VB or flash than to put together some custom cross-platform DHTML for a cool web effect. Is exclusion of browsers on minority platforms a primary goal, or only an unintended consequence?

2) In 1997 a lot of "open source" code wouldn't compile on a 64 bit linux machine (DEC Alpha). Were the 32-bit processor folks conspiring against the nascent 64 bit folks?

Malice? Not necessarily. The rhetoric will whip up the already-converted, but I think it will fall flat on the ears of the undecided. While I agree that it would seem that being opaque and/or incomprehensible has been a really strong aspect the Microsoft business strategy, I think we'll have a better chance of being taken seriously if we stick to technical considerations (including so-called "IP" entanglements).

not nearly as good as supporting Open Document

[bhav2007]

If they start trying to support Open Document, it would be a huge pain for them, because they would have to adapt or change their document's structure and DOM, which would probably mean re-doing a good amount of their work on Office. So, instead, they just throw their "open" standard on the table and say "How about you support our format". All of this makes perfect sense in M$'s strategy because they still leverage their complete dominance in this market by forcing their competitors to re-build to their standards, instead of the other way around.

It is very unlikely that M$ will ever release their format in a way that is truly "open" (i.e. usable in open source software). The simple reason is that Microsoft consider's their documents to be their intellectual property. They will always seek some sort of royalties or benefits because they consider them part of their company's assets. The healthy number of patents they apply for each week (what is it, like 30, right?) supports the fact that IP is an emerging part of their business model.

The other downside to this whole thing is that M$ is the last company who should be defining implementations for the rest of the market. The protocols they define in house have always been a huge source of pain for anybody else trying to understand them. At times it almost seems like their protocol is simply defined by how the current version of their software decides to spit out bits. SMB is a good example, and there are probably others. This isn't even particularly bad behavior when you consider that these protocols/formats were never meant to work with anybody else's software; however, when M$ begins dictating that the rest of the world adopt their proprietary formats, you end up with a bunch of buggy software that works about 98% of the time. All the documentation in the world will never create a stable format which is well designed to work with a multitude of implementations. Sadly, this move will probably work well for M$, and we will end up with a situation similiar to SMB, except that it is even more difficult for business's to work around.

Rendering, reading, interacting what Google wants

[mattr]

Haven't RTFA but if it only covers how to write a legal file then it likely does not include rendering (how to draw it on the screen / to a printer) nor how to read / write efficiently, either.

It may well be that only MS Office 5.0 or whatever is opened. And let's not talk about Excel cells, or those line drawings in Word that never seem to come out right in OOo.

Only if MS promises to now and forever provide immediately, online a fully open reference implementation and spec for all the formats used throughout Office, including the interfaces for embedding, publishing, accessing etc.. then can it be called open. Of course it will still be to their advantage even if they made a 100% total commitment to this, the question is only how little do they have to do to meet EU regulator approval. I have little faith in regulators, a bit more perhaps for Boston and other municipalities/countries that are requiring use of a non-MS open standard.

The most useful thing for companies right now would be for MS to provide an open source tool that lets them read their tons of old word documents into a database. That isn't going to happen while MS is in a war with Google. And that's why it is only about writing files, and also why as long as Google aims at the desktop there will only be a bare minimum of the way Office really works being implemented.

And how about a tool to convert heavily VB scripted tools into OOo or perl? No, these massive investments are the momentum that keeps the corporate world firmly in MS' pants. Not this decade.

Re:Internal docs?

[spitzak]

No, they almost certainly do not have any documentation except for the Word source code. It is pretty obvious that Word format is a mess of back compatability and forgotten hacks by hundreds of different programmers. Microsoft would like to get rid of it as much as everybody else, if they could replace it with a well-designed but obscured format.

The amount of man YEARS of work needed to write this documentation, especially compared with the week or so that would be needed to do a half-assed read/write support of ODF, is staggering. Another indication that Microsoft is scared out of their minds that some people might use ODF by default.

Open standards, not open source

[cyberformer]

The only software that implements OpenDocument right now happens to be FOSS, but it doesn't have to be: Microsoft, Apppe or anyone else can implement the format without having to publish their source code under the GPL or give it away freely.

This is all about interoperability. Software vendors can still sell licenses, but they will have to give people a good reason to buy them (and not just Microsoft locking people in to its proprietary file formats). OpenDocument will probably be good for software companies that aren't Microsoft, provided they're working on a niche type of document that isn't already covered by the standard (free or MS) office suite.

At least Office has critical mass...

[fishbowl]

I've just run into another company who is following the Microsoft model to the teeth.

A certain audio hardware maker who I won't name, but it's Mackie, makes a line of control surfaces for digital audio workstations. They are really well-engineered hardware devices, by anyone's standards.

However, the company advertises the communication protocol they use as "Univeral", and claims that they are open and anybody's software can support them.

Naturally, I got excited about this, and decided it might be a good project for me, to create the driver layer for Linux/ALSA/JACK systems, and maybe give Ardour support for Mackie's HUI.

So I investigated, and contacted the company. Boy, did I get a harsh, hostile response. Turns out their protocol is not open at all. Specs may be available under NDA, at the company's discretion, and I know from another developer that the NDA contains language that binds you into a partnership with the company far beyond a mere release of the specs.

Needless to say, I was shocked (SHOCKED!) that a company would advertise the openness and universal compatability of their hardware, while ALSO failing (REFUSING!) to make documentation available even to the people who buy the hardware.

It put the company, who I will not name, but it's Mackie, on my personal blacklist forever. Other people may have less radical policies, but mine is "corporate deathlist forever banned, period, the first time they are openly hostile to an open source developer."

Since they aren't Microsoft and don't have a billion users and since their users don't include governments, etc., there's not much hope for them to come around.

At least with Microsoft there's a chance...

Errr

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh? HTML isn't meant to be rendered the same everywhere. That's up to the browser. Deliberately.

three words

[spatenbrau]

Three words:
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish